


pick up your pieces, one by one

by mondegreen (teesandjays)



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/M, Paul-centric, sometimes you just need to make up a backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 18:23:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teesandjays/pseuds/mondegreen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Count to ten," his mother used  to tell him. "Breathe, and count to ten, and you’ll be okay.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	pick up your pieces, one by one

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> hahaha don't ask how long i've been writing this i gave up it's done and over with, take it as it is.

_Count to ten_ , his mother tells him, her voice a steady presence in his mind that he latches onto with a terrified sort of desperation. He’s seven and in a fit of childish rebellion ignores his mother’s warnings and decides to climb the big tree in their backyard anyway.

On his third branch, his foot slips and he falls.

It’s a clean break the doctor tells his parents, as they finish setting his arm in a bright blue cast.

His arm itches and it feels like something’s inside of him, dragging itself just beneath the surface of his skin and he can’t breathe, needs to get it off, get it off right now –

 _“Count to ten. Breathe, and count to ten, and you’ll be okay_.”

It’s whispered in his ear, soft and knowing and warm and he starts counting.

**one.**

He’s seventeen when his parents die in a car crash – the cliché of all clichéd orphan stories.

It was instantaneous they tell him, they wouldn’t have felt a thing. He wonders if that’s supposed to make him feel better, if it’s meant to be some sort of strange comfort that they most probably never even realized they were going to die until they were already gone.

He didn’t even get the chance to tell them goodbye.

It’s a saying he used to hear all the time, whispered in broken sobs in hospital waiting rooms, hardened and stoic yet still shaking in somber rooms coloured in black. It’s only now that he understands, understands what regret feels like sitting heavy in your chest,  what guilt tastes like hanging on the tip of your tongue – things you should’ve said, could’ve said, would’ve said and you could still say but they won’t be heard.

He understands the heaviness that presses down on their shoulders, it makes him want to break and fall to pieces, turns his mind dark and messy and everything is too loud even though he’s surrounded by silence – his muffled cries echo throughout the halls and he swears he can hear the pitter patter of tear drops hitting the floor.

He wraps himself up in blankets and sheets, smothers his face into his pillows and pretends he can’t hear his heart breaking.

**two.**

His parents were only children and both his grandparents passed away before he was born. Neither of his parents wrote any wills, didn’t leave anyone to take their places because they’d never thought to before. That’s the thing about death though, it comes when you least expect it and his parents lived their lives in blissful ignorance.

They finally scrounge up a blood relative – a great uncle on his father’s side who seems to only agree to take him on because Paul turns eighteen in three months and after that can kick him out without a care in the world.

His great uncle – _it’s Robert, not Rob or Bobby, just Robert –_ is quiet, the intimidating kind of quiet that’s filled with cold stares and lips pressed into thin lines, the corners almost always pulling downwards before straightening back out, reluctant to give away the emotion hiding behind them.

He’s almost eighty, is a chain smoker and lives almost practically in the forest.

The first time he walks into the house, he looks at the wall of hunting rifles and then to Robert who simply stares back blankly at him.

“Is there a problem?” he asks, his voice gruff and raspy.

In a distant part of his mind he realizes that they have the same eyes while responding with a quiet ‘no’.

A week later he wakes up to the sound of gunshots, his eyes wide and his heart in this throat as he struggles into a pair of pants before running outside. He almost trips twice and by the time he reaches the door, his hands are shaking as he tries to open the shutter door.

When he finally gets the door open, he’ll find Robert behind the house with a loaded gun prepared to go out for a hunt. He’ll look at Paul with the same steely blue eyes he sees in the mirror every morning  and after a few seconds of silence will ask him if he’s coming along. Paul will nod and Robert will tell him to put on some shoes and a jacket in that rough voice of his.

It’s in the middle of a dark forest early in the morning that Paul will learn how to hunt, will learn how to shoot a gun and take down a target from over fifty feet away.

It’s in the middle of the night in a house that he never grew up in, with a man he barely knows yet shares the same blood as that he will learn about the glorious tragedy of war – will learn about stories of brotherhood under skies of blood and smoke, the sense of belonging that comes with fighting for something much bigger than yourself. It’s in this house that he will be swept up in the gore and morbid nature of battle, of realizing with a sudden clarity just how fragile life can be.

Paul is drawn to danger like a moth to a flame – it’s a hopeless, desperate sort of obsession, the need to see how far he can push himself before he breaks.

By the time he turns eighteen he’s already enlisted in the military.

**three.**

It’s everything he’s always wanted but at the same time he never would have expected it to be like this.

Paul hasn’t had someone to call family in a long time. Robert is technically but in the most detached sense of the word, and while Paul can appreciate him for somewhat giving him a direction to follow in his life, he can’t call him family. Doesn’t think of home and warmth and belonging when he pictures him in his mind.

But here, in a barren desert where he feels as if his lungs are made out of dust and his skin has long been scorched by the unforgiving sun – here he  finds family in a rag tag bunch of misfits just like him who’ve lost everything. This is their salvation even though it will likely be their end. At least here they will die by something other than the sadness in their bones and the darkness that traps their hearts.

At least here they won’t die alone.

**four.**

Over the years he gets transferred more and more, and keeps moving up in the ranks. He gets commended for his duty to his country, for his determination and commitment to the job.

He wonders when killing became second nature to him, when his hands began to feel empty without his rifle in them, it’s warm metallic weight  a part of him as much as  his own blood  and veins. It gets easier over the years. His hands stop shaking when he has his finger against the trigger. He learns to stop second guessing himself at every opportunity and just _does_.

And when he doesn’t think, he excels.

It’s a shame that the one skill he’s ever perfected during his time was stealing the life from someone’s body.

**five.**

He meets Dave and has a friend for the first time in years. The camaraderie between them comes naturally but then again it’s hard not to fall into other people out in the field. There’s not much time to talk about feelings and learn each other’s favourite colours and shit like that, but you learn how to trust. You’re forced to trust because the guy at your back is the one barrier between you getting out alive and being sent back home in a box. Giving over your life to someone to watch over is surprisingly easy when death keeps trying to latch itself onto your back.

Dave has his six and he never lets him down.

Paul knows nothing about his life back home but he knows he has someone important waiting for him there by the letters that arrive for him like clockwork every time mail comes. He knows that Dave has a sweet tooth like no one else and hoards sweets in a box under his bunk and can shoot a bull’s-eye ten times in a row without blinking.

They make jokes and banter at each other and it’s nice he thinks, to know he can still laugh even when it seems like his insides are made out of air. Maybe he’s  not completely empty yet.

**six.**

He still isn’t quite sure how he ended up with the contracting job. Most of those memories are blurred to him, repressed into dark corners by the sheer will of bitter regret.

They call it friendly fire. It sounds like a bunch of guys joking around, shooting the shit without a care for the consequences.

It was an accident, a hit gone badly, they were at the wrong place at the wrong time – the excuses go on forever. He wonders when it’ll stop feeling like murder and then remembers that’s exactly what is was. They send home six cold bodies in boxes and all he can taste is bile in his throat. Guilt  eats away at his stomach, rage runs in his veins and a cold sense of finality settles in his chest when he realized that the monster he thought he was fighting was never behind the lenses of his scope but rather, it was staring back at him in the mirror.

Some nights he wakes up covered in blood and scrubs himself raw until his skin is pink and there are welts on the softest parts of his body. He still sees crimson running underneath his skin, flowing out of his pores and running down the shower drain.

It’s never, ever his blood.

He remembers when they pulled out the bodies and realized one of them was his best friend.

It’s funny, he thinks to himself sometimes, of course he’d destroy the one thing akin to family he had left in this god forsaken world.

The nightmares never go away, he still wakes up in a cold sweat, his hands stained with red that never washes off. He wishes he deserved something as sweet as death.

This life has become his coffin, his own personal hell which he will gladly burn in. It’s the only fate he deserves.

**seven.**

They cover it up in pretty lies, make it  look none of it was ever his fault and his  name  is cleared. They ask him to repay his debts and it seems simple enough – watch over the girl. They till him to pretend, to make his way into her life and set himself up there. Paul has long since lost control of his morality code and doesn’t think twice about it.

Beth is beautiful. Quiet but determined to be successful. There’s an emptiness to her though, like looking at a painting that’s beautiful in essence but lacks all  the emotion that makes it come alive. Maybe that’s why he finds it so easy to be with her, because she  understands what it’s like to lose pieces of yourself to life.

She doesn’t ask about his nightmares and he doesn’t ask about hers.

He learns her  body, the twists and the curves, the places that make her shiver and moan and the ones that make her gasp and laugh and kick out against him. It’s easy to pretend he’s in love with her – to forget for a moment who he really is and just lose himself in her body. Some way along the way he realizes he’s using her – he’s always known it but has never acknowledged it in the light of day. He thinks he should feel guiltier, should hate himself more but he doesn’t really think that’s possible by now.

Paul thinks she’s always known though. She was always good at reading eyes, could always tell when someone was lying to her about something just by looking. He still wonders even after she’s gone if she knew – knew that he would never love her the way she wanted him to. And of course he loved her – he’s spent long enough sharing a bed to know the intricacies of her life, to know her like the back of his hand because he’s seen sides of her she’s never shown to anyone else. It doesn’t mean he loved her the right way because he didn’t. It was a twisted and selfish kind of love, forged out of a deal with the devil that he’ll spend more lifetimes than he’ll have regretting. 

He still remembers the first time they had sex, how she looked  up at him with those big brown eyes and it felt like she was trying to search for his soul even though it had been long gone. She’d pressed her lips to his, soft and sweet and so unlike anything he’d ever known before. He’d held her face in his hands and looked right into her eyes and thought ‘I will be the end of you’.

It was  only a  matter of time really.

**eight.**

Sarah is a different kind of entity all together. She’s a hurricane and he’s a tornado and he doesn’t think he’s ever quite seen something as beautiful as the devastation they leave in their wake when they collide.

She’s relentless and refuses to hold her punches, will scrap by with any means necessary to get what she wants and rest assured, she _will_ get it. It’s the determination that gets to him honestly, the loyalty to her family and the breathtakingly desperate need to survive that shows in every step she takes.

Sarah Manning is a without a doubt a force to be reckoned with and for the first time he wonders not if he’s going to destroy her, but if _she’s_ going to destroy _him_ – if he’ll be able to survive her.

Paul has never fiercely wished to live through something so much in his life.

**nine.**

Some nights he’ll wake up with a hand wrapped around his throat – with cold fingers pressing into his skin leaving purple marks that bleed black and red. His bones feel hollowed out and lined with grief. It’s suffering at its most finest.

Some nights he’ll wake up thinking he’s dying, and the nights that he doesn’t, he wakes up wishing for death – quick and painless or long and drawn out, the light in his eyes dimming second by second as the darkness steals the life out of his body.

He still doesn’t know which one he deserves to be honest.

But some nights he’ll wake up with her arm curled around his chest and her body pressed against his back – warm and breathing and alive.

Those are the nights he goes back to sleep.

**ten.**

“I love you,” he whispers one night into her neck. It’s so soft he can barely hear himself and his voice shakes when he says it anyway. It’s the first time he’s said those words to anyone for more than half his life and it makes him sick to his stomach, turns his organs into roped knots pulled hard and tight.

Sarah doesn’t  say anything back, just wraps her arms tighter around him, her fingers pressing so hard into his skin he knows they’ll  be bruises there tomorrow morning. He doesn’t expect her to say it back, will most probably never expect her to say it back but it’s okay. It’s okay because for the first time in years he feels like he can breathe. The demons  will never leave him  alone, will always rage terror and havoc upon him in the dead of night when he’s weak and vulnerable. But he’s learnt how to deal with it, can breathe through the vice in his chest even when his eyesight turns blurry and his lips taste like salt and every wrong decision he’s ever made in his life.

Guilt and regret are etched into his skin, it runs through his veins and lives in his every inhale and exhale. But he no longer feels like he’s drowning in them and for the first time, he can see the surface just a reach away, the light at the end of the tunnel that always calls him back, willing him to fight through it, to survive.

He’s never felt the need to live more than when he’s with her.


End file.
